ENOVIA VPM Team BOM Editor

ENOVIA® Team BOM Editor provides part and Engineering Bill of Material (EBOM) management capabilities as a logical extension of the CATIA® design environment.

Many companies streamline the design and engineering process by having product engineers perform product design and engineering tasks. In addition the design engineer needs capabilities to electronically communicate and collaborate on product development ideas and issues.

ENOVIA Team BOM Editor creates a competitive advantage by addressing key product design and engineering business challenges such as:

- Improved communication and collaboration with product development teams.

- A design and engineering information platform that provides the right information to the right users at the right time.

- EBOM synchronization and navigation is initiated directly from the CATIA user interface. When the CATIA designer navigates the parts and EBOMs in Team BOM Editor, the access to the objects are controlled /restricted based on the design project context.

Derive and synchronize an EBOM directly from a CATIA product structure

Augment and edit the EBOM for cross-functional use with a web-based structure browser editor

Improve team communication by providing the ability to route information for feedback and review

Create, analyze, approve and implement both product design and BOM changes using a robust change process with templates to accommodate company specific reviews and approvals.

Make improved product development decisions with analysis reports that quickly identify component usage, highlight differences between assemblies, and summarize design changes over time.

Decrease purchasing delays and errors by providing a quantity roll up of parts from a multi-level EBOM

Development Team Communication and Collaboration

ENOVIA Team BOM Editor is built upon the ENOVIA platform, which provides collaboration capabilities including data security, and formal and ad hoc process support.

Part Management

ENOVIA Team BOM Editor provides part management capability in development lifecycles for managing work-in-progress designs. Parts that do not have a 3D definition can be defined as “local part” to EBOMs so they will not be synchronized to CATIA. To manage parts in a design centric approach, parts will have limited edit access with ENOVIA Team BOM Editor when they are associated with the CATIA products (marked as “VPM Controlled”) to the ensure CATIA product is the master. In addition, the access to parts is controlled based on the secured login context configured in the ENOVIA® VPM Team Central™ administration console. Users logged into the system with specific P&O context can view and manage the parts that are created in that specific project in both private and public workspaces. Users will also be able to see the public parts from other projects.
Parts in ENOVIA Team BOM Editor can be identified by a unique auto-numbering scheme or by user-entered names. Part revisions can be created for managing the evolution of design and changes for an item if the current part number corresponds to a released part (e.g. -- tooling or production). Each new part revision must be form, fit, and function (“FFF”) compatible with all of its predecessors. “FFF” is a description of an item's identifying characteristics as defined below:
- Form is the shape, size, dimensions, mass and/or other visual parameters which uniquely characterize an item. This defines the "look" of the part or item. Sometimes weight, balance and center of mass are considerations in 'form.'
- Fit is the ability of an item to physically interface or interconnect with or become an integral part of another item or assembly. This relates to the associativity of the part in relation to the assembly, or to other parts, and includes tolerances.
- Function refers to the action[s] that an item is designed to perform. This is the reason for the item's existence, which also includes secondary applications.
If the specifications or criteria, for form, fit and function of a particular item are met, all other attributes, from an engineering design process perspective are moot or extraneous. Interchangeability on an item in a system is mainly determined by physical, functional, and performance characteristics or specifications that uniquely identify a component or device.

EBOM Management

ENOVIA Team BOM Editor provides development teams with a single, persistent definition of EBOMs. This reduces data errors and time delays. By defining the EBOM with parts of specific types, users can capture specific business behavior and attributes. Users can structure EBOMS for even the most complex products with thousands of parts organized across many levels of hierarchy. An integrated structure browser allows users to navigate and edit multiple levels easily. Users can create and add multiple new parts to an EBOM in one operation or add multiple, existing parts by search or explicitly entering the part name.

EBOM Editing

Comprehensive EBOM editing capabilities include the ability to copy parts to and from existing assemblies, and replace, add, remove, and re-sequence parts in the EBOM. Differences between EBOMs can be listed in a detailed text format or an intuitive highlighted side-by-side format. Multi-level where used capabilities enable users to quickly determine affected items, raise change requests and perform complex mass change operations such as replace, add, remove, or edit.

EBOM Data Packages

Users of ENOVIA Team BOM Editor can generate and download a “data package” of EBOM related data. The package of data files can be in either a Microsoft Windows® or UNIX® ZIP file format. Users can specify BOM levels to include in the package, select specific documents for the package, download the package and store it in a workspace folder.

Synchronization with Design Work-in-Progress and Visualization

ENOVIA Team BOM Editor works with ENOVIA VPM Team Central seamlessly with bi-directional synchronization capability. This enables CATIA V6 data to be available in the context of the EBOM and it provides consolidated document and EBOM views outside the CATIA session in the web environment.
Parts and assemblies can be visualized in ENOVIA Team BOM Editor with the 3DVIA® Viewer, which is available as part of the ENOVIA® Live Collaboration license. The user simply clicks on the 3DVIA Viewer icon from the EBOM page and 3D image of the part will be displayed. Users can review the 3D image with functions such as rotate, zoom and panning.

Product Development Change Processes

ENOVIA Team BOM Editor is delivered with an engineering change process which supports updates to both design and EBOM data. The change process in ENOVIA Team BOM Editor supports a seamless process for initial release of a part for production use and manages and controls subsequent changes to current approved part(s) at any point in the lifecycle of the item. Users can analyze, review and implement changes for released parts, assemblies and design data. ENOVIA Team BOM Editor’s change process can be configured with approval and notification templates.
For any in-work objects (or data), the change is intrinsic to the specification/definition process. In a typical product development cycle, the specification or the implementation of parts is likely to change during their development or integration. These design changes are commonly referred to as Engineering Change Orders (ECOs) and affect the functionality of a design after it has been wholly or partially completed. ECOs can compensate for design errors found during testing or changes that are made to the design specification to compensate for design problems in other areas. ECOs enable the engineering best practice rules of FFF. If a proposed change is FFF compatible then the ECO affected item will be revised. If a proposed change is not FFF compatible then a new part number should be used. A “mass replace” change capability is included in the ECO process to enable the replacement of an existing child part with a new part for all or selected affected parents when a part replacement is required to implement a FFF incompatible change.
In a typical product development lifecycle, the need for change is caused by, one or more of the following conditions:
- Correction of a design error that doesn’t become evident until testing and modeling or until customer use reveals it.
- A change in the customers’ requirements necessitating the redesign of part of the product.
- A change in material or manufacturing method. This can be caused by a lack of material availability, a change in vendor, or to compensate for a design error.
- A proactive change initiated by design or engineering in order to modernize or enhance an existing design

BOM Reporting

ENOVIA Team BOM Editor has many out-of-the-box reporting capabilities tailored to meet the needs of BOM compare functional areas. These reports provide valuable product information for cross functional groups to make informed and timely decisions thus contributing to overall product development and planning efficiency and quality. Reports can be formatted in a printer friendly format or exported to Microsoft Excel®.
Multi-Level EBOM
Any number of EBOM levels can be expanded and included in the multi-level EBOM report.
EBOM Comparison
This report improves part reuse and product quality by providing the ability to compare two EBOMs for differences.
Part Where Used
This report provides a part’s single or multi-level parent usage, which is very useful in analyzing the scope and impact of engineering changes.
Consolidated EBOM
This report improves purchasing response time and reduces errors by providing a quantity roll up of parts from multiple levels of an EBOM.
Engineering Effectivity
The engineering effectivity report provides the ability to view an EBOM based on an historical date. This report enables the user to see the “effective” EBOM at a select date in the past.
The EBOM view can be “expanded” by displaying each reference designator value as a single EBOM record. This is particularly useful for consistently displaying electronic or location-specific items in the EBOM. For example, an EBOM record with a reference designator value of “R1-R3” and a quantity value of 3 would be expanded to display three separate EBOM records with reference designator values “R1, R2, R3” and with a quantity of 1 for each. The inverse view can also be calculated where an expanded view can be consolidated.

Technical Document Management

Any document type, including Microsoft Office, can be managed independently or associated to parts. This improves inter-department communication and company knowledge capture such as best practices and industry standards. Documents can be connected to parts, specifications or changes objects as reference documents or supporting documents as needed.